The Inmates Are Running the Asylum Ch 1-7

by Alan Cooper

In the first half of his book Alan discusses the many problems with allowing a programmer design a program/product as of 10 years ago. He does this by bringing up two distinct categories of users, the apologists and the survivors, who deal with "cognitive friction" slightly differently. The apologists blame themselves for the their problems and troubles with technology; while the survivors are those who just barely scrape by. He discusses the differences between interaction and interface design and how they should effect how something is programed. He rants a lot about dancing bear products that were a problem at the time of the book being written and the reasons, or should I say reason, behind it, the programmers. He also makes a good argument for not wasting money on always hitting a deadline but instead actually making a good product that will help prevent customer disloyalty. Which he then goes on to discuss that if you can bring customer loyalty you don't have to worry about time to market as much and you can make better products that will bring higher customer loyalty. He raps up the first half of the book by putting almost all of the blame on programmers and saying that they are a completely different species called homo logicus.

Overall I think the first half of the book was better than Don Norman's "Design of Everyday Things" but I dont believe that the issues discussed apply as much to today's programming world because almost all of the things he discussed have been atleast partialy addressed by todays companies.

Team Analytics: Understanding Teams in the Global Workplace

by Jan H. Pieper, Julia Grace, Stephen Dill


This paper discusses an application called Team Analytics which combines information from many different enterprise tools for groups of people, specifically ad-hoc teams that communicate via email, instant messaging and video conferencing. It uses things such as an organizational chart, offering time zone awareness based on time pain calculation for the group needing to meet, picture gallery to help put a face to a name, and an attribute pie chart to help graphically show the percentage of each part of the team is associated with each part of the organization.



There was a survey done by a third party, the web site host, that had rather positive feedback for this application and all of its features. The only real complaint was that the time zone pain chart was hard to understand how to use; which I believe was because be people not knowing how to mark their time because the word "pain" confused them.

Overall I think that we do need a program such as this incorporated with any type of online team but I don't know if I would necessarily pick this one because its testing and usage was very specific to the company that made it.

A Reconfigurable Ferromagnetic Input Device

by Jonathan Hook*, Stuart Taylor, Alex Butler, Nicolas Villar, Shahram Izadi

This paper discussed the creation of a ferromagnetic input device which allowed the creation of any shape input formed with ferrous. The device has the ability to take input from such things as ball bearings, ferrous bladders, and any other kind of magnetic substances and use them as if they a were a track ball, a touch pad, or anything else you would like them to be. This was done through the use of multiple coil rapped permant magnetics configured in a checkerboard pattern (i.e. opposite poles) on top of a board that processed the data and sent it to the computer and was translated using a custom C# library.

This paper is very interesting because it offers a very user configurable input method. However with that diversitility there is a requirement of a complete library to be able to use any shape input device which I dont feel is possible as of yet. This is do to the fact that literly any touch or change of shape could/should be transfered into a type of input and even though the sensors will pick this up I dont see it being possible to then use that input in a meaningful way easily in a variety of programs which severly hampers the uses that can be obtained from this technology. But I do see the many possiblities this has to offer due to the magnetic displacement of almost every object once the technology has progressed far enough almost anything will be able to used as an input device and not just ferrous.

User Guided Audio Selection from Complex Sound Mixtures

by Paris Smaragdis

This article disscussed the use of complex sound, mainly human voice, to filter out specific sound in audio recordings for editing or removal. The concept behind the idea is that a user mimics that sound which they would like to work with and then the application filters out that sound. This can be used for such things as removing a singers voice from a track for those who wish to be able to hear just the background music. This is not a new concept to sound editing however the ability to use a specified sound "object" input is new to this field.

I believe that this is an awesome idea that could very well revolutionize normal user sound editing and mixing. However some faults I see with this work is the ability to truely mimic only the soudns that you would like to remove may limit your ability to properly filter the audio file.

The Design of Everyday Things

by Donald A. Norman,

The book is written about how the design of everyday things should be done and the existing issues with current designs as of 20 years ago. The author mainly focuses on the simplification of devices and the need to have their functions follow more natural mappings. Such things as stoves should not require you to have to think about which nob to turn in order to turn the correct burner on. He also describes designs that are so straight forward that you don't need anything except to have the knob for the correct burner to be in the natural location for that burner i.e. the knobs should not be in a row on top of the stove unless the burners are arranged in that way. Another example that he talks about is the fashion in which sinks are designed and how there are many natural mappings that can be applied to their design but due to the desire for creativeness and elegance there is no set standard in faucet designs. This causes many headaches for everyday users that must determine how to use each faucet they come to in their busy lives because there is not standard with which they can rely on.

One of the things you will notice when reading the book is that the author repeats points over an over again which is good to drive those points home but causes readers like me to find the book very repetitive. This also makes is seem almost like he is ranting about a small set of things instead of describing a very wide spread problem at the time he wrote the book.

Moving past his slight ranting I really enjoyed the part of the book devoted to human memory and how we handle situations and the way in which we explain them to ourselves. After reading this book and reflecting I find that I do the same kinds of things on a regular basis and always have to remember that upon new information I might have to rethink they way I think things work such as an air conditioning thermostat or a fridgerator as he describes in the book.

Overall I think it was a good read that will help me keep in mind the problems faced by designers today and the need to devote as much time as possible to making a product or application as user friendly and straight forward as possible to help users be able to take full advantage of the designs with out the lack of use of features that the author describes so much.